Investment in network infrastructure can boost long-term economic growth in OECD countries. Moreover, infrastructure investment can have a positive effect on growth that goes beyond the effect of the capital stock because of economies of scale, the existence of network externalities and...

Policy reforms aimed at boosting long-run growth often have side effects – positive or negative – on an economy’s vulnerability to shocks and their propagation. Macroeconomic shocks as severe and protracted as those since 2007 warrant a reconsideration of the role growth-promoting policies...

Policy reforms aimed at boosting long-run growth often have side effects – positive or negative – on an economy’s vulnerability to shocks and their propagation. Macroeconomic shocks as severe and protracted as those since 2007 warrant a reconsideration of the role growth-promoting policies...

During the economic and financial crisis, fiscal positions across the OECD countries deteriorated sharply. This raises the question of what level of primary deficit would ensure long-term sustainability and what degree of consolidation is needed. The purpose of this paper is to gauge the scale...

This paper provides an analysis of large and sustained fiscal consolidation episodes in OECD countries implemented between 1980 and 2000. It reviews how fiscal policy variables evolved during these episodes, how consolidation was influenced by the wider economic environment, and how the...

This paper examines the effect of economic crises on structural unemployment using an Autoregressive Distributed Lags model and accounting for the role of institutional settings. Analysing an unbalanced panel of 30 OECD economies from 1970 to 2008, we found that downturns have, on average, a...

In this working paper, we decompose fiscal policy in three components: i) responsiveness, ii) persistence and iii) discretion. Using a sample of 132 countries, our results point out that fiscal policy tends to be more persistent than responding to output variations. We also found that while the...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relation between the volatility of government consumption and country size. Using a sample of 160 countries from 1960 to 2000 the main findings of our empirical analysis suggest that: 1) smaller countries have more volatile non-discretionary and...

This paper examines the effects of fiscal policy on output in the euro area. For this purpose we develop a DSGE Fiscal Model with endogenous government bond yields to assess the impact of different fiscal policy shocks on output, its components and on government debt. The simulations suggest...